Privacy Predictions 2025!

In 2014, we saw many ideas more at home in sci-fi movies and novels become an everyday reality—Star Trek-like replicators in the form of 3D printers, James Bond-ish smart cars, and advanced machine intelligence courtesy of IBM’s Watson. Hold these thoughts as we now present privacy and security related news items from the future along with the questions raised by these emerging threats from our own time in 2014.

Any parallels to Orwell’s 1984 are (we hope) purely coincidental.

Hackers Uses 3D Printed Eyeball to Fool Retinal Scanner
2014: Many data points were created when President Obama got 3-D printed. Whether it’s the president’s or just an ordinary citizen’s biometrics, who should have access to the data points of heads, arms, finger, retinas, etc.?

2025: Interpol’s Cyber Security Division yesterday arrested a gang of biometric cyber thieves. They were caught using an eerily life-like plastic eyeball encased in a super-clear glass block. The thieves had previously hacked into idVault, one of the world’s largest data brokers, and 3D rendered the physical eye structure from stored retinal digital signatures …

Cyber Carjacking Ring Foiled
2014: Automakers know how you roll, but how will they use, store and protect the data collected from our increasingly smart vehicles?

2025: Working from a high-rise office building in Los Angeles, a ring of hackers had been stealing cars remotely by exploiting a new vulnerability found in automakers’ Microsoft-based telemetric controls. After owners parked their self-driving vehicles, the thieves used bots to crawl the IOE (Internet of Everything), insert special code into the navigation module, and then drive the cars to a special garage owned by the hackers. Police say they had never seen …

Data Broker idVault Sued
2014: Personalization has simplified how we locate products and services. With highly targeted advertising and content selection, are we as consumers being secretly penalized and denied access to an alternative world of ideas and options?

2025: idVault, one of the world’s largest personal information brokers, was sued in federal court yesterday. This is the largest ever class-action brought against a data broker. The suit came about when consumers in several states noticed sudden rises in their auto insurance and credit card rates soon after they had installed a free children’s game app in their car’s operating system. The app secretly was secretly sending GPS and other navigation data to idVault, which was then selling the data to financial companies …

Cell Phone Hackers Caught Impersonating Bank
2014: In today’s cellular networks, how can we ensure that we are not being monitored by third parties (private and governmental).

2025: With the cost of cell phone transmission electronics having plummeted over the last few years, 5G equipment is now within reach of ordinary citizens. Beside the new wave of private pop-up cell phone carriers offering free streaming video, hackers have also gotten into the cell phone business. Recently a hacker collective was caught using their own pirate cell phone tower to intercept calls. Their software filtered out connections to banks and brokerage house, handing off the rest to Verizon. The FBI said the hackers appeared to callers as personal bankers …

Clothes and 3D Masks Make the Hacker
2014: With the help of 3D printers and the ability to render various images when shopping, how can we realistically authenticate ourselves for even the most basic services?

2025: The smart mirror technology has improved greatly since department stores began using them in their dressing rooms a few years ago. These special mirrors now allow store customers to view inventory, select clothes, and then render images of the shopper in different virtual outfits. However, hackers were found to have penetrated one high-end department store’s firewall, stealing images and data about its customers from the embedded file servers in the smart mirrors. Using 3D printers, they generated realistic masks, and then dressed in similar outfits to their victims. Police say they almost got away with opening an enormous credit line ….